Chad’s Morning Brief: Hillary Clinton Pushes Gun Control and Obamacare, Rick Santorum Wants to Make a Comeback, and Other Top Stories

Here is your Morning Brief for the morning of May 7, 2014. Give me your feedback below and tune in to The Chad Hasty Show for these and many more topics from 8:30 to 11am. Remember, you can listen online at KFYO.com or on your iPhone/Android with the radioPup App.

Important Election Dates:

Election Day for City and School Board: May 10

**KFYO Election Night Show: May 10th 7-10pm**

Early Voting for GOP and Dem. Primary Runoff: May 19 – May 23

Election Day for GOP and Dem. Primary Runoff: May 27

Mark Wilson, Getty Images

Hillary Speaks

Hillary Clinton has finally spoken on two policy issues that should grab headlines. According to POLITICO, Clinton defended Obamacare and called for gun control.

Not only did Clinton talk about guns, she said some pretty ignorant things.

The former secretary of state, who would be the Democratic frontrunner in 2016 should she run, was delivering the keynote address at a conference held by the National Council for Behavioral Health, an organization that focuses on mental health.

“We have to rein in what has become [an] almost article of faith, that anybody can own a gun anywhere, anytime. And I don’t believe that,” she said, as applause drowned her out.

Clinton, who argued it was possible to hold her position and still support the right to gun ownership, warned that unfettered access to guns could have dangerous consequences. She called the country’s approach to guns “way out of balance,” and referred to cases in which gun violence has erupted over minor issues.

She painted a dark picture, warning that, “At the rate we’re going, we’re going to have so many people with guns everywhere, fully licensed, fully validated, in settings where [one] could be in a movie theater, and they don’t like someone chewing gum loudly or talking on their cell phone and decide they have the perfect right to defend themselves against the gum chewer or cell phone user by shooting.”

Clinton continued, “That’s what happens in the countries I’ve visited where there’s no rule of law.”

The proliferation of guns combined with few restrictions on where they can be carried can “give someone the means to respond in the moment in a way that he wouldn’t if a few minutes passed and there was no means to inflict harm … We really have got to get our arms around this,” she said.

Again, a liberal using emotion to argue against guns. Where is the evidence that a licensed CHL holder flipped out on someone and shot them for chewing gum? Where has that happened? Clinton said it happened in countries with no rule of law. Well guess what Hillary, we have laws in this country.

Clinton also spoke about Obamacare.

Clinton also spoke in support of President Barack Obama’s health care law. While she has previously defended the law, she has also stressed she’s open to changing it in the future. But on Tuesday, she focused more on what she said were positive aspects of Obamacare.

“There have been many complaints and concerns about the Affordable Care Act, but I’ve been struck by the polling I’ve been reading,” she said. “Because it tells the same story: A small majority of Americans don’t think they like the Affordable Care Act, but a large majority of Americans don’t want to do away with the protections that are in the Affordable Care Act. A small majority wants to repeal it, but that is slowly receding as a rising majority says, ‘No, fix it.’ This is the tradition of good, old-fashioned American pragmatism.”

Her comments earned a positive reception in the audience, which included many health care professionals.

“Yes, there are things that can be fixed, but just the preexisting conditions elimination in and of itself is such a huge gift,” she said. “We never should have had to pass legislation for it.”

Clinton, who is perceived by some on the left as too moderate and friendly with Wall Street, spent a significant portion of her speech focused on the more populist-friendly issue of income inequality.

She warned of potential “social collapse” as she detailed the challenges facing people in poorer parts of the country, especially women. Some of those women are facing a shorter life expectancy than their mothers, she said —something that “correlates strongly with unemployment and economic stress.”

Clinton ticked through a standard list of Democratic priorities as answers to social ills.

“We need to be honest about what’s happening in our country,” she said. “We need [to] take a clear-eyed view about some of the causes of this social collapse.”

She called for expanded health care; affordable child care; raising the minimum wage; paid family leave and “for women we need to ensure equal pay for equal work,” among other policies.

“The debate about economic inequality is often carried out in political terms or economic terms, but it’s social, it’s a psychological challenge,” she said. “We need to start demonstrating our care for one another, particularly those that are struggling the hardest.”

Clinton is beatable for 2016, but Republicans must choose the right person to run.

Santorum 2016?

Rick Perry isn’t the only 2012er attempting to re-brand himself in preparation for a possible 2016 campaign. According to National Review, Rick Santorum is attempting to show a new side of himself that isn’t only focused on social issues.

Rick Santorum is rebranding himself. With the bruising 2012 primary behind him and another presidential bid in his sights, the former Pennsylvania senator and famous culture warrior is out with a new book, Blue Collar Conservatives, that puts his longstanding interest in working-class issues at the fore.

Defeating same-sex marriage has become reclaiming marriage culture. His new book’s index doesn’t have one reference to abortion, and it’s barely mentioned in the text at all. In Santorum’s much-longer 2005 work, It Takes a Family, several chapters are devoted to abortion. Medicaid goes from one mention in his 2005 book’s index to five in this book’s.

It’s working-class concerns, not “social issues,” that Santorum says turned his months-long slog through Iowa in 2011 and 2012 into an incredible upset victory in the state’s caucuses.

In a big 2012 field, it was Santorum who carried the mantle of the conservative alternative to Romney to the very end, winning eleven states and 4 million votes until finally suspending his campaign on April 10, 2012.

Two days later, he says, he got the idea for the book. Ex-candidate Santorum, who never hired a pollster, appreciated it when Romney consultant Neil Newhouse offered to share with him some numbers from the campaign. After an early lead in the exit polls for Romney in the Alabama and Mississippi primaries had melted into a Santorum victory, Newhouse started asking what time of day voters were planning to go to the polls. In a poll for the Pennsylvania primary that Santorum never contested, voters who planned to vote before 5 o’clock favored Romney by four or five points. Voters who didn’t plan to get to the polls until after 5 were going Santorum by 21 points.

“Although the media never reported it,” Santorum writes, “I knew I had connected with working Americans during the [2012] campaign, and not because I had talked about ‘social issues.’”

In 2012, Santorum got a lot of support from Bible Belt Evangelicals, and he’s quite frequently mistaken for one. He shares many of their values, for sure, but he’s a Rust Belt Roman Catholic, which leads to a deep philosophical appreciation for the role of family in politics and a powerful personal connection to American workers. That explains the gist of his message: The American worker and the American family are in deep crisis, and only when both are healthy is the country going to succeed.

He frequently mentions his 2012 Iowa victory speech, in which he talked about the funeral of his grandfather, an Italian-immigrant coal miner whose hands, in old age, bore the marks of a lifetime of proud, hard work. With the decline in the coal industry and the rapid shuttering of American steel mills, Santorum’s home, western Pennsylvania, has seen maybe America’s most dramatic deindustrialization, and all the social problems that crop up in its wake. No presidential candidate is going to bring back Bethlehem Steel, but one who understands the pain of its absence, Santorum thinks, is essential.

Why should Americans be paying attention to a failed presidential candidate who hasn’t held office since 2007? For one, he seems to be the Republican candidate most openly suggesting that he’s going to run in 2016. It’s not just the gratuitous Iowa mentions in his book. When asked about 2016, Santorum says, “Right now I’m doing everything I would be doing if I were going to run.”

But he’s also tapping into a rising trend in the conservative movement: the realization that the solutions of the Reagan years don’t match up with today’s problems, and that conservatives need reform-minded ideas that focus on working Americans.

This isn’t a new idea for Santorum: In his 2005 book, he derides his deficit-obsessed GOP colleagues in the Senate as essentially “cheap liberals,” and he proudly worked on a number of anti-poverty bills while a legislator. He even turned his Senate office into a welfare-to-work program: He describes in his book how, when setting up his constituent office in depressed Harrisburg, Pa., he hired five employees who were on welfare. One of them, a single mother, risked losing her subsidized child care by taking the job, and could swing it only by finding family members who were able to help take care of her kids.

That track record, though, didn’t prevent him from being typecast as a social-conservative culture warrior. Is insisting that the GOP talk more about marriage and family any way to break the mold of moralizer-in-chief?

Encouraging marriage, he says, “isn’t a moral argument” per se, it’s a public-policy priority. In his Iowa stump speeches, he liked to cite a Brookings study on how people who graduate from high school, get married, and have kids, in that order, almost never end up in poverty.

“The foundation of a stable civilization is the family. The family breaks down — the economy suffers, the state suffers, the community suffers,” he says. Marriage is a public good, he argues, that ought to be promoted just like any other — staying in school, or quitting smoking. “There isn’t any disagreement about the public benefits of [marriage,]” he says. (He complains, based on this line of questioning, that evenNational Review reporters now don’t seem to understand how important marriage is.)

Santorum wants to do a lot more than talk up marriage, though. He has a number of policy proposals to create an economy that can support working families — some unique to him, and some that other reform-minded conservatives have been pushing.

You can read more by clicking on the link above. What do you think about Rick Santorum?

These and many more topics coming up on today’s edition of The Chad Hasty Show. Tune in mornings 8:30-11am on News/Talk 790 KFYO, streaming online at kfyo.com, and now on your iPhone and Android device with the radioPup App. All guest interviews can be heard online in our podcast section after the show at kfyo.com.

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